The hip new shiny thing for a new company is to position themselves as a service. Stepping back from the hype machine for a minute, can you really identify a service provider when you see one? Or are the companies that sell themselves as services are actually tools. And what differentiates a tool provider from a service provider?

A tool is designed to deliver a single unique function, such as a hammer or Twitter. Yes, Twitter is a tool. It is designed to take customer input in a variety of formats and from a number of sources and blast that content out to a variety of other formats and destinations.

Twitter is the tool. The items that feed into Twitter could be other tools (Tweetdeck as an example), or they could be true services, such as Ping.fm. What separates these two?

TweetDeck is a tool that feeds input into Twitter, and helps you manage output.

Ping.fm takes your input, and sends it where you what, modifying the format appropriately and hiding it all from you. It took the complexity of a problem (How do I post to multiple social media sites simultaneously?) and delivered a service solution, not a tool solution.

The problem with tool providers is that the problem, no matter what it is, always is a great for their tool. All customer problems fit neatly into the boundaries of what they know, and can be solved by what they sell. Tweetdeck’s answer to helping you with Twitter is to give you more Twitter your way. But it doesn’t extend or build on Twitter to create something that is truly new.

Solution providers look at the customer problem and see something new. The team at Ping.fm took a look at their personal social media management issues and found a way to create a social media input service. FriendFeed and FaceBook looked at the social media world and created a social media output service.

While tools are cool and shiny, they inevitable face the “Hammer v Screw” moment. The point when the tool reaches the outer ability of it’s ability to be useful.

Having many different hammers isn’t the solution. Heck, throwing in a wrench and a screwdriver isn’t the answer either. You’re still just selling tools.

When you step back and think about your business, when you consider what you deliver to your customers, can you really say that you deliver a service that extends and adds value to the tools you have at your disposal, that you are providing to your customers?

Or does everything just look like a nail?

There is clear dissatisfaction with the current state of marketing among the social media mavens.

• Fred Wilson and Union Square Ventures are looking for companies to invest in to take advantage of this.
• BuzzLogic releases their conversational ad service.
• The Inquisitr moves from AdSense to Technorati Media, indicating a potential shift at b5 Media.
• Lookery is providing demographic information that is relevant to social media providers and shaping ad presentation that way
• A completely off-the-radar person such as myself realizes that there is gold in what holds the attention, and that’s not always the latest and greatest

So what can be done? Jeff Jarvis points out that the problem lies with measurement. I agree, as there is only value in a system where all of the people involved agree on what the metric of record will be, and how it can be validly captured.

Currently CPM is the agreed upon metric. In a feed based online world, how does a CPM model work? And, most importantly, why would I continue to place your ads on my site if all your doing is advertising to people based on the words on the page, rather than who is looking at the page and how often that page is looked at.

In effect, advertisers should be the ones thrying to figure out how to get into the community, get into the conversation. As an advertiser, don’t you want to be where the action is? But how do you find an engaged audience in an online world that makes a sand castle on the beach in a hurricane look stable?

The challenge for advertisers is to be able to find the active communities and conversations effectively. The challenge for content creators and communities is to understand the value of their conversations, the interactions that people who visit the site have with the content.

In effect, a social media advertising model turns the current model on its head. Site owners and community creators gain the benefit of being attractive to advertisers because of the community, not because of the content. And site owners who understand who visits their site, what content most engages them, how they interact with the system will be able to reap the greatest rewards by selling their community as a marketable entity.

And Steven Hodson rounds out the week’s think on communities by throwing out the subversive idea that communities are not always free (as in ‘beer’, not as in ‘land of’). If a community has paid for the privilege of coming together to participate in communal events and discussions, then can’t that become an area for site owners to further control the cost of advertising on their site?

While the benefit of reduced or no marketing content is the benefit of many for-pay communities, this benefit can be used by site owners by saying that an advertiser can have access to the for-pay community at the cost of higher ad rates and smaller ads. The free community is a completely different set of rules, but there are also areas in the free community that are of higher value than others.

In summary, the current model is broken. But there is no way to measure the value of a Twitter stream, a FriendFeed conversation, a Disqus thread, or a Digg rampage. And until there is, we are stuck with an ad model that based on the words on the page, and not the community that created the words.

For FriendFeed has become my replacement for Google Reader, which I only visit occasionally now to see if there are blogs I need to add to my feed.

But, if you are going to replace a reader with FriendFeed, how do you manage the flow of content. While tools will likely improve over time, I have adopted a simple strategy.

1) Scan for items with obvious links

As I power through the front page of my feed, I look for items that are obviously links to longer articles. I can then decide if I want click through to that article. But rather than opening it in a new tab right in front of me, I use the wheel-click option in Firefox and open these articles in a background tab. This allows me to scan through the fees and read the articles when I want.

2) Read Twitter/indenti.ca/Jaiku/etc. last

Personal conversations come second for me. If there is a thread I am interested in, I will wheel click the Twitter page for the person and pick it up that way…or use Twitter Search. Being the kind of person who processes personal communications last makes this easier.

3) Use the FriendFeed interface as much as I can

If there was a way to open posts in a frame such as the way that video and images are embedded in FriendFeed, I would never go to anyone’s actual site. While that may be a feature of the future, the storage implementation for the FriendFeed team is potentially enormous – unless they choose to retrieve the content on the fly.

And finally…

4) Gripe about TinyURL, etc. links and how I don’t know where they lead

A great feature of the future for FriendFeed would be to translate obfuscated URLs to their base URLs in a rollover

And there you have it. Not the world’s most intense primer on using FriendFeed, but it works for me!

The latest “rage” flooding through the social-media world is identi.ca, a Twitter-like micro-blogging service that is built on open-source servers and code.

As with anything that becomes an overnight sensation, the problems of success tend to follow. Using GrabPERF, I have been monitoring the HTML download time of my personal message stream. The results have been interesting.

Much has been made of social-media leaders that says that this is a clone, and that it is slow, etc. But, as has also been noted, it is:

• A one-person operation
• open-source code
• willing to admit that it needs to grow.

So, one-day never makes a performance trend. Over the last week, in my day job, I have watched a large online retailer suffer a similar fate to this newcomer to the social-media arena.

And if everyone who was willing to wait for Twitter to recover waited ten seconds for identi.ca to catch up, then there is a good chance that it may stand a chance of becoming a true competitor, pushing performance improvement.

Plurk was a non-starter for the twitterati. Jaiku has lost momentum, and is failing Google in the same way that Orkut did. And Pownce…what is that?

I hold out high hopes for identi.ca, if only to keep Twitter truly honest.

Lately, there have been outages for two large sites: Amazon and Facebook. Working for a company that monitors such things made me able to confirm the nature of the outages.  But how I became aware of them has had me thinking in new ways for the last few weeks.

I became aware of both of these outages through a combination of FriendFeed and Twitter within minutes of them starting. This information spread quickly. And, due to the nature of these new technologies, people were able to comment on the outages, and theorize about the cause of the problems these large online firms faced.

The question you are likely asking is “So what?”. Well, as anyone who has been paying attention for the last four years should know, while you cannot completely control the conversation, you can participate in it and help prevent the spread of negative or incorrect theories about what is happening on your site.

The technologies that people who come to your site use to comment when something goes wrong can be used to interact with the customers. The classic example of this is Zappos. If you look on Twitter, you will find a number of members of that organization who are using the service to interact with customers on a human level. And if you have a problem or question, you stand an excellent chance of getting a response from the CEO if you ask a question.

So, if your site experiences an issue or problem, how do you interact with customers? Or do you just hope they don’t notice?

Yes, it’s YATPBP (Yet Another Twitter Performance Blog Post).

About 10 days ago, I turned GrabPERF loose on Twitter. Now before you accuse this of crippling the service and bringing it to its knees, realize that GrabPERF simply requests a document over HTTP about two times a minute. No additional requests are made for images and the like.

In the ocean of requests coming into the Twitter systems, the GrabPERF requests are like individual water molecules being added to the pool.

The above graph shows performance for the last 24 hours. The purple dots are errors. Complete details, and a dynamically updating graph, can be found here.

Now that I have had a chance to show off, I will leave the Twitter team in peace. I am not a developer or a systems expert. I, like most people, rely on people with specialized skills to analyze and resolve the problem. There are many people on the Web who have taken on the challenge of reverse-engineering Twitter to try and determine how it does what it does, and how they would build a better mousetrap.

Ok. Go do it. Or shut up and let the Twitter team get down to the hard work of making this service work. Or volunteer to help them fix the problems.

The Twitter team has stated that they know how to resolve the issues that are at the heart of the performance issue. But as I said in a comment to @gapingvoid tonight, knowing what the solution is only makes up 15% of the application development process. Building, testing, deploying and verifying the solution takes 85% of the effort.

The Twitter team has a lot of work ahead of them. Buy them beer and pizza and let them get to it.

When FireFox 1.0 was released, the sites hosting this eagerly awaited software effectively were overwhelmed by the number of users attempting to download it.

A colleague of mine referred to it as a Success Failure. What is that? It simply means that you have been so successful at getting the word out and getting people excited about the release that you fail to deliver as a result.

Given the background buzz and increasing frustration of people, it seems that Twitter is having the same thing right now. Question is not so much the cause (broken code? new hardware run amuck? old hardware groaning? a breakpoint in the number of users causing the system to seize up?), but the effect it is having.

High profile users of the service are upset. Regular users are wondering if it’s time to seek an alternative.

Part of the frustration stems from the lack of updates from Twitter itself. For a service that is designed to provide people with flash updates of ongoing events, it appears that they are failing to make use of their own technology and approach. There a semi-secret Twitter Status timeline available (here).

I hope that the team at Twitter get it figured out soon, as I am a new addict to the system. I hate to think that I finally started on this meme at the precise moment that it collapsed.

Those who saw me at the edge of the A-list (B-list? are those terms valid anymore? I am so out of touch) circle during the first wave of the blog explosion saw me flag and then fall. But where did I go? What did I do?

I left town, essentially. Mentally. I had to go down a new path, find a new cause, lose that cause, explore more. Step away from the places I had known for so long.

I went into Typography. Architecture (Mid-Century Modern). Design. Photography.

And I come back refreshed. I come back being at least 6 months behind in M&A news, new products being flogged by Guy, in opinions expressed by Fred and Brad.

I can recommend it for anyone. I know that the people out there have become addicted to it all. But walking away from the constant need to be informed, to be in the game, on your game, it’s exhausting.

And when you mix in my bipolar (follow the category, young man), things can get really intense.

I will now be participating with fresh enthusiasm.

Staring into the spiraling madness of Silicon Valley and laughing, so glad I can watch from afar. Visit occasionally, but juts sit in the audience and let the lions fight it out.

So, what do I need to know?

Oh. If you want to follow me on twitter, I can guarantee sleep.